Sneak Peek: Wufoo Hackathon Projects

by Wufoo | May 29, 2013

If you’re anything like us here at Wufoo, you know about the magical qualities of a) caffeine, b) working with amazing & talented people, and c) hackathons. We decided to combine all three and took some time from our regular scheduled day-to-day work to participate in the quarterly SurveyMonkey Hackathon.

We broke off into teams to spend a caffeine-fueled 26-or-so hours experimenting and developing ideas that we’ve been kicking around for a bit. And while these are hardly finished products, we thought it would be cool to give our loyal Wufoo customers (that’s you!) a quick glimpse of some of what we were working on. Think of it like a teaser trailer of things to come.

But first, a quick side note: we also had a side competition for best logo and we decided to go on a nostalgia binge and summoned all the 8-bit we could from within ourselves to come up with the logos for these projects. To help set the scene, we also had theme music, which you should now listen to courtesy of this awesome chiptuned track from Soundcloud. Trust me, it totally sets the mood.

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## CODENAME: WuBox

The first project was from Larry Kuang, one of the engineers on Wufoo. We’re all big fans of Dropbox here at Wufoo (we use it constantly for sharing files, docs, everything really) and thought Wufoo users might be, too. So Larry decided to take on the challenge and brewed up a quick integration with Dropbox and named it **WuBox**.

Instead of storing uploaded files from users who fill out your Wufoo form, we thought it’d be great if the file was instead uploaded to your Dropbox account. Perfect for freelancers to get images, logos, or other assets from clients right into their own Dropbox account.

Larry temporarily set Dropbox up as a notification partner integration which made it ridiculously easy to setup and get running. Add your App Key and App Secret, choose where you’d like filed uploaded to your form to be stored, and you’re done.

When a user uploads a file to the form, it’ll be automatically be uploaded to the Dropbox account for you to use, instantly.

**WuBox** and this integration **isn’t** ready for prime time just yet, but rest assured, we’re working on it and would love your feedback and comments about this so please let us know what you think.

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## CODENAME: WuSign

Next up was a collaboration between Chandra Nagaraja, Tom Slykhouse, and Adam Lichtenstein, three more engineers on the Wufoo team. They had an idea: wouldn’t it be cool to be able to add your signature to a form when you fill it out? That way, we would remove the need for people to print out PDFs or other forms just to sign it. Now you’d just fill out the form AND sign at the same time. They decided to build it and they named it **WuSign**.

When setting up your form and you want to add a signature field, you’ll be able to add a signature field type just like you would any other field types. Simply drag the signature field to your form, save it and boom. Your users will be able to sign their forms instantly. Best of all, the signature field works on mobile devices like your iPhone or other such mobile computing device, so it’s even easier to sign.

We think **WuSign** is really cool and there are a lot more technical and design hurdles we need to clear before it’s ready for everyday use, but rest assured that we’re working hard to make sure this is as easy to use as it is awesome.

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We hope you enjoyed this sneak peek at our hackathon projects as much as we enjoyed working on them. Remember, this is merely a quick look at some awesome new features that we worked on for 26-or-so hours, so they are definitely not finished products.

We’re working feverishly to make these features as easy to use as possible and to put the final polish on them that you’ve come to expect from us here at Wufoo. It’s a quick preview of **some** of the **many** things we’re cooking up here and hope you’re as excited about them as we are.

Everyone needs a hug. AND, we really need a way to manage our forms with forms name that appear in the Wufoo list. This would be hugely helpful. Let me know if you would like further elaboration! Thanks,

Just left a meeting where we discussed for hours the issues of moving all of our current forms online due to signature needs. . .we are trying to move everything online, this signature feature would be ENORMOUSLY useful and solve the entire problem. . . .please getting it up and running!!!

Please fast-track the DropBox integration. My suggestion would be to add the ability to tack on the Entry ID to the beginning of the file name before it’s sent to DropBox OR designate subfolders by Entry ID. It would make it much much easier to cross-reference against Bulk Exports. I administer fairly large photo contests using WuFoo and this integration would have saved me over 12 hours this month. Keep up the good work.

Love the signature feature no doubt. For us at least and for the countless customers who have chimed in over the years, I don’t know what the hold up is but a solid save and return feature for finishing forms would seem to be a higher priority.
As much as I like Wufoo I see us migrating very soon to a different form builder because of this need. Your forums have been acknowledging demand for this feature for over six years.

Expand the DropBox integration to include Evernote and Google Drive as well. The idea above from Andrew is a must as well with regards to having a way to inject a prefix or suffix or other identifier to keep things organized and efficient for long-term storage, indexing and retrieval.

While you’re at it, the ability to store more than 1 file at a time is HUGE. Right now if we have more than 1 file to attach we have to zip them first, then attach the zip file. This is a real challenge for many users. Also, if the way you plan to store them with DropBox will allow for some kind of communication between Wufoo and DropBox (or Evernote or Google Drive) so that a thumbnail of the image will appear in the Wufoo entry in the database that would be awesome as well. Evernote does this nicely with what they call “Snippet View” of notes that have image or other file attachments. A preview would be really handy.

Signature feature will be handy and definitely needs to give the option to sign in multiple ways, touch, mouse and possibly the attachment of a signature image when a proxy needs to sign for someone else in an organization.

WuBox is phenomenal and definitely would keep me using Wufoo instead of trying to find another service. I also run a contest where folks submit JPEGs and PDFs. Anything to help get those sorted into DropBox folders for later use would be huge.

Signature First. There are other integration services that can be combined with your existing notifications capability to deliver a file to Dropbox — or anywhere else — and I use one of those services to deliver files to me in that way today. But what I don’t have and would use immediately is the signature field. If you got it up & running in 26 hours or so, just think what you could do if you cleared away 40 or 80 hours. Certainly you just borrow the existing code base and attach a small amount of new code for this capability? Don’t wait until the comments close (August 27, 2013) here to add this feature —- please.

In total agreement with Eileen. I get the use of dropbox and would be great, but you can do it already. The signature feature opens tons of abilities for groups out there and can help add features to paperless companies. Get it going! You guys are really awesome.

Awesome ideas. We would love to stop asking members of our cabana club to print out a pdf to sign. If we could integrate an electronic signature, that would be awesome! And we use Dropbox too so uploading their picture to Dropbox would be perfect! nice work

Love both ideas. One addition to the Dropbox idea…it was pointed out to me that the documents I was requesting from registrants (I have to collect driver’s licenses for a rally event) became insecure after the registration because they were included in the email reply. I want them to be able to see the choices they made in case there was an error but hopefully the dropbox integration would prevent the forms going back out as attachments? or maybe if there was a way to exclude documents from the auto-email reply but still send the choices they made in the form?

Thanks for the great response and feedback guys and gals. Your enthusiasm is what gets us out of the bed in the morning! We’re definitely working as fast as we can on these new features (and more, shhh).

Both ideas would be helpful. In our particular case the WuBox would be used immediately, almost every time a customer submits a form on our site. The WuSign would be used much less frequently but nonetheless be helpful. Hope these become production sooner rather than later …

I NEED WUBOX. Like right now. Not kidding. I use Wufoo for my forms on website we just launched, but I am right this minute looking for another or an additional solution so I can easily allow clients (who are NOT tech savvy) to upload multiple documents directly into a Dropbox folder. The docs need to be transmitted securely, as they contain proprietary information on occasion. When the files are saved, the name would need to retain the original file name but also include a couple of the field names from the form. So basically something like:

entrynumber lastname firstname original file name

But you guys are way smarter than I am so I leave it to you how to pull in some unique identifiers in the file name that would make it easy for us to go in to our Dropbox/DocumentUploads (or whatever) folder and move the files to the appropriate client file without having to open the document, read it, and rename it. We need to receive anywhere from 1 to 10 documents per submission, and they are usually doc, docx, or PDFs.

The signature thing would be fantastic, but it would be even better if it could incorporate with Docusign or Echosign (what we use now).

Love them both and could put them to use right away. Hoping that you add the feature Andrew suggested above to WuBox. But if you do, please also allow for a hidden field with the relative path to the file plus file name.

Cool ideas but I would outsource Wubox to If This Then That (ifttt.com). If you’re not familiar with this service, it’s pretty fantastic. Dumb simple linking of web app APIs based on If Else statements. Plus then you’re developing for a slue of web apps and not just Dropbox. https://ifttt.com/channels

WuSign looks pretty cool and I could see some good applications for this. But personally I would like to see a couple other features added before this.

Better reporting and sorting for form management. Some way to report on multiple forms would be saving me a ton of time on a Wufoo clean up project right now. Also, please display the form creation date somewhere on the form or in the form manager and give us more sorting options in the form manager (alphabetical!, public/private, etc.) It would also be nice to see the last entry date next to the form name in the form manager view.

These things sound really great. I will third Ellen and Jordan’s comments about organizing forms. Currently we have 5 different people making forms … a lot of forms. It can get confusing to find the one that you are looking for, because you don’t want to add a weird code at the beginning for searching because then it becomes part of your form’s name that everyone filling out the form sees. So folders would be a fabulous addition.

Love this idea! With the way I use WuFoo and DropBox it would be great to have a fied determine where the files are uploaded to DropBox. For example, if someone types or selects “seven heaven” in a certian field then when the form is submitted the files will upload to /dropbox/1/ folder. If someone types “Walmart” in a certain field then the files will be uploaded to /dropbox/2/ folder, etc. This way I dont have to go back and reorganize my files in dropbox, they will already be in the respective folders. A report of who submitted what would be nice too. For example, it would say Jennifer Hudson submitted 4 files to the /dropbox/1/ folder and list the names of the files. Will there be a file size limit?

WuSign would be amazing and save us from using a separate vendor just for waivers! Though, is it legally binding? Is there any work being done on its compliance with ISO 27001 international certification?

Exciting! Any idea on how long until we will be able to use both of these new features? We currently use Dropbox and have been researching other means for the signatures including docusign etc…..We have a project where we need signatures in the next 2 weeks….any chance of this being ready by then?

Love the signature field thing. We currently use Formstack when we need a signature or a combination of wufoo, zapier, web merge and then docusign to generate wufoo submits as a PDF, manually upload them to Docusign and send them to be signed.

Oh and a way to organise the forms would be amazing. One massive list of forms can be quite painful.

Totally agree with George Athens. I love so many things about Wufoo but my clients are begging me for a ‘save and resume’ function. They like Wufoo but can’t understand why this feature isn’t available. Hopefully we’ll get this feature soon… maybe in the next couple of months? 🙂

i use wufoo to file my work hours. it would be very great for me if i could type in start and end and the form would ask google for the distance, multiplies the kilometers with for example 40 cent and fills out a field with the amount… i am sure that is able to build… it would be very very great for many people i think. greetings from germany 🙂

I would love both! I use WuFoo for my client contracts, and would like being able to store them in dropbox for all in our office to have easy access to. Additionally, the signature thing would allow me to take off the part that says “typing your name here substitutes as your signature.”

WuBox, I have set this up externally for clients to get a free account with a link directly on the form.
Once they uploaded images for their business, they would come back to the form and add the shared link to the form.
So, yes all for WuBox direct upload to my account with Drop Box, as long as I can identify it with that particular form submitted, would be great.
Thx Wufoo

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